


Phantom Life Syndrome

by alyyks



Series: Family Ties [1]
Category: Awaken the Stars Series - Jer Keene
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Feels, GFY, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Abilities, Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-15 12:35:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9235493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyyks/pseuds/alyyks
Summary: Eric's stone at Arlington is just a damned stone with no body underneath. Because they never found a body.Because Eric never died to leave a body to find.





	

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERS. SO MANY SPOILERS. NO SERIOUSLY. Go read the book Ashlesha (read it twice). Then come back here (I was assured reading this twice hurts good too).
> 
> The one line not in english has hover text translation, and an end note translation for hover text that doesn't work.
> 
> Title and beta by norcumi@tumblr, thank you so much, and many hugs to flamethrower for the new playground.

Eric Som dies in Iraq on the twenty-third of April, 2005. He’s almost perfectly two months from his and Ella’s twenty-fifth birthday. They’re somewhere on the road near Baghdad and they got ambushed and the IED sends him flying, bleeding, dying.

Dying doesn’t take.

+

(here’s what could have happened:

The IED send him into fucking orbit and he can’t breathe and he’s this close from a corpse—the enemy passes him over, take his shit, leaves him bleeding out to die on the side of the road.

There, too, it doesn’t take. It’s not Rex who finds him, his fucking bonehead brother who went AWOL to find them because Khodī̂ had a bad feeling, but it’s his twin, Ella, and she screams and Rex is there too and it’s Rex getting Eric’s blood all over him trying to keep it inside his body.

Eric still leaves his leg, two fingers, half his field of vision, and half his hearing behind, there too. Then it’s evac, military hospital, evac stateside, military hospital again. He misses a good bit of the good gossip, Rex getting reamed and it spectacularly not going anywhere. At some point, when on the good drugs, there are some really fucking weird conversations with people with no apparent rank and creepy fucking smiles that he gives the finger to. His father gets a weird look that promises a body count by the end when Eric tells him about it. Eric gets the feeling that it has to do with 1991, his father’s history with the US army and that whole shit, and the stuff they do not talk about in military hospitals—or anywhere else that’s close to military unless it’s tacked on with the last name Merrill, really.

Eric gets an honorable discharge and a prothesis that’s sized properly that he hates and physical therapy and he goes home.

Home is Dad’s home, at first, because he’s still not at his best and his vision is fucked, and it makes his father relax, if infinitesimally. He takes the same room he grew up in, and the first night Ella finds him, climbs into bed with him, and they hold each other tight. They breathe.

Ella and Rex and Khodī̂ retire from the armed forces when they’re supposed to, don’t sign up for more, don’t even think about it.

Khodī̂, in February of 2006, is seven months from retiring from the army. In November of that year, he’s in Cambodia, visiting their mother on the tail-end of his running around the South Pacific, almost in Django’s footsteps and with a lot more condoms in his pockets, because his siblings are assholes like that. Two months later he and Rex are in New Zealand, getting their tattoos. Ella and Eric are there for moral support or something—and ribbing and drinking, certainly.

Eric doesn’t feel ready. He’s earned the right to wear it, yes, but … He says _not yet_ , to his cousins, to his siblings, and they don’t push further.

Eric keeps on hating the fucking prostheses, and improving them. It turns into building one leg from scratch, following the technology advances, going for the fun that is 3D printing and getting Ella to yell at him for the mad scientist tech lab he burrows in at their house. He makes himself prostheses, good ones, bad ones, ones with joints that don’t work, ones with joints that works, ones with neural feedback. Ella approves with great delight of the mostly-unusable leg one that includes a flamethrower; it’s too heavy to use on the regular, but damn if it isn’t sweet. He ends up working with Wesley and his people at the clinic, once he knows what works and what doesn’t. Then he keeps building himself leg after leg, because by now it’s just fun. The fingers prosthesis are mostly made of little fiddly bullshit parts. When he gets a pair that actually work well, it’s a relief to be able to hold and fire a gun properly again. Using his left hand never felt right, even if he could still bullseye his targets, not like Rex who never had a preference.

He sees Kai grow up. He meets Nari a few days after she’s born. Akiba lives on, and tears them all a new one for never fucking visiting. He mocks Khodī̂ mercilessly for getting shot by a drunk during his brother’s first year as a county sheriff. He doesn’t rein in Ella, because there’s nothing to rein in and also where’s the fun in that—the both of them have… interesting adventures further north that the rest of the family pointedly don’t ask about. He mocks Rex mercilessly for getting involved with a guy who was _bratva_ , and swears never to tell anyone but Ella. Then, several years later, he mocks Rex mercilessly for the elusive boyfriend none of them seems to be able to meet.

Eric dies, lives, goes home, spends the next eleven years with his family.

It’s not what happened.)

+

_Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella_

+

Dying doesn’t take.

Eric wakes up half blind with a mouth full of sand. Passes out again. Wakes up again. It’s a pattern that repeats for a while.

When he can stay awake for longer than a couple minutes, he’s… not on the side of the road near Baghdad anymore. He’s somewhere else—it takes another few awake-not awake cycles to understand which language the people around him are speaking, that he’s being kept for ransom, that they want him mostly alive for that.

The ransom reason only lasts so long. They don’t care, not about that, not really. They help him, they feed him, they treat his wounds. Eric lives, learns to walk with a crutch, learns how to go around with one half of his vision fucked.

He just wants to go home. They get him on a caravan to Baghdad in January of 2006.

Roj Yasin and his family are one of the few things that go well, when he thinks about it.

+

Dying doesn’t take.

Going back to the US forces in Baghdad, and from there going home, doesn’t take either.

Ain’t that a bitch.

A lot of shit blurs together in 2006: too much to think about, too much to keep track of, just too much at the same time and running running running like his life depends on it because his life _does_ depend on it. February is the worst part of that whole stretch of time, and for a while after Eric is at a loss to remember most of it.

(Several years later, there’s his brother and a new scar and “we’ll discuss February later.” They discuss it later. His brother is in front of him but he almost wasn’t, and Eric understands him a little too well.

Eric doesn’t let go of him for a while.)

+

_Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella_

+

Eric runs. After Akiba’s murder, he doesn’t stop to even take a breath.

He can’t stay in the Middle East, and he can’t go back to the States, and he can’t contact anyone he knows, not even his family. They are a family of crazy badasses, him included, but he can’t take that risk. He needs to go to ground, to lose himself in a crowd, to keep an eye on who is on his tracks and stay ahead of them.

His family plans, and the bags buried around his and Ella’s house, were always set up for them to disappear and regroup in the South Pacific. All of them were fluent in at least one language from the area, and they can blend in better than anywhere else.

Eric might not have the bags, but he remembers the plans. He never thought he’d need them, even after 1991, even with the justifiable paranoia nipping at their heels. He can’t risk contacting his mother, can’t risk putting her in danger. There’s still a couple bags hidden away around Phnom Penh with money and papers from the last time he, Ella, and Khodī̂ went to see their mother.

Cambodia it is. There’s just a continent to get through, a department to avoid, mercs and more to dodge and hide from.

Dying didn’t take, but living is a dangerous state of being. So he runs.

Eric becomes a ghost.

+

_Ella Ella Ella Ella Ella… Ella?_

+

Phantom limb syndrome is a pain. It does get a bit better once he can get—and by this, understand _steal_ —a prosthesis that’s not complete shit, but then it’s still not sized properly and he’s still missing two fingers on his right hand. Phantom limb pain becomes real what’s-left-of-limb physical pain.

He dreams of the farmhouse, sometimes, of how they wandered into each others’ dreams at night, the familiarity of his siblings’ minds against his. Even after he and Ella had their own house, even when they went Rangers, he still had Ella’s mind warm against his. They were twins after all, and a little more than that—enters NDAs and Dad’s history.

Phantom limb is nothing compared to missing Ella’s mind against his. He’s stuck in a loop of expecting it there and being too far and finding nothing leaning against his thoughts and trying to go further: he’s hopping with his mind the same way he hopped on one leg and a crutch at the start, a perpetual off-balance act.

There are blips sometimes, a sensation very much like Ella is right next to him, close enough to touch, impossibly out of reach. As time passes, from _sometimes_ the blips go to _rarely_ , to _never_.

On the run, his dreams feel cold when he can remember dreaming at all—when he can sleep at all.

\+ 

_Ella?_

+

One year turn into two, turns into three, four—five and he has brief glimpses of his siblings through video cameras, newspapers.

He was always good with computers, but he has to get beyond that, to become better than good. He can’t find a single way of knowing who exactly is looking for him, but he can erase where he has been, slip in through other places, look through other’s screens. He makes it hard for anyone to follow him.

Compared to other things he’s had to learn to do, avoiding satellites and their cameras, vanishing, is disturbingly easy. He can do it exhausted and shaking on caffeine pills and so sleep deprived that walking even with a cane feels like crawling, that sitting up is a perpetual fight against gravity. It’s a good thing he gets so good at it. It saves him, over and over and over again.

The gun he keeps on him at all times is far too tempting sometimes. It’s tempered by the terror of what the department would do with his remains. Eric knows he’s good, but even five years in, he knows he’s just a few steps ahead of whoever is looking for him. It wouldn’t take much for them to find him: he has to keep moving by any way possible.

He never type in the names of his siblings, of his father, can’t take that risk, but there are other ways to find them. Newly-elected Sheriff Khodī̂ Som has a scar Eric had never seen before. Kai ‘Aukai goes through high school. Brian and Wesley Ngata both retire from pro football. Rex takes DoD contracts—and it is so, so tempting to shadow him and contact him somewhere Eric knows he can talk to him… and he knows it’s a bad plan. They’re Django Whetū’s kids, and if there’s no discreet extra attention paid to Rex as a contractor from a certain unnamed department, Eric will eat his latest stupid hat.

It’s black and orange, it hides his all too obvious hair, and he can’t stand it anymore.

The first pictures he tracks own are pictures from his own funeral, on the logical thread that most of his family and friends—the ones still alive after the fight, and he found the names of the ones for whom death stuck to in Iraq, unlike him— would be there. That’s a terrible idea. He never wanted to know his father could have this expression on his face. He never wanted to see his family bury another one of them, even if he was alive. They didn’t know that—and they buried an empty coffin.

Ella… Eric can’t find an image of his twin before 2011.

Eric looks from afar, a ghost, and tries to pretend that knowing they are alive is enough enough enough.

+

… _Ella?_

+

He can’t go to the States, but not all of his siblings live in the States. Xāwuṭh Bùi never hid his distaste of the country—too many people—, and much preferred to be left the fuck alone on his boat, somewhere between the gulf of Thailand and the Celebes sea.

Eric plans this for three years. Xāwuṭh’s hard to find for multiple reasons, and would probably skewer him good and proper if he knew the extent of Eric’s careful web of surveillance. There is still a chance Eric would get himself skewered: Xāwuṭh carries a lot of things on his boat, the fucking pirate, and Eric can be certain his older brother carries his knife on him at all times.

A knife, Eric can dodge. If Wolf has guns onboard now… well that would be a short and messy reunion. The part of him that’s bone-deep exhausted and that has looked at his gun too many times in the last seven years has no objections. The rest of him just wants to get somewhere safe, and if he has to shed blood for it, it’s worth it.

So Eric comes onboard, at night, Wolf’s boat in open waters with nothing for miles around. It’s dark, moonrise not coming for another two hours. He couldn’t run the risk of being out in the open for too long, couldn’t go straight for Xāwuṭh in a stolen boat or by fucking swimming; he hasn’t tried to swim anything he couldn’t touch the bottom of with his prosthesis and he’s not about to try now. He made his way hopping and hiding and hitching rides, and finally by dropping a dinghy close enough from his final goal that he can row the rest of the way.

He waits pressed to the hull until he sees shadows moving on the deck, waits until he can see that it’s his brother and not a crew member. Then he reaches for the guardrail and goes up and over—and Xāwuṭh’s fast. The glint in his hand is definitively a knife. Eric dodges that, hands up and in the open, and falls down. There’s just enough light from the dinky LED overhead that he can see Wolf’s face. Eric starts laughing. He made it.

He made it.

Xāwuṭh crouches down, looks at him like Eric’s a ghost, like Eric is going to bite. Eric laughs harder. Reaches for his brother, feels him reach back. It’s been so _quiet_ , he hadn’t realized he had shut off everything to hide and Wolf has always been _open_ and _loud_ and he’s _right there_ against his thoughts…

He doesn’t remember when the laughter turned into sobbing and screaming, or when Xāwuṭh hugged him hard enough to crush him, or when Xāwuṭh started demanding for Eric to answer him, going from English to Khmer, or when Eric hugged back hard enough to leave bruises.

He made it.

(When he tells this bit, almost three years later, his twin at his side and his whole family around him, Khodī̂ then asks: “What happened then?”

“Then? Oh, I was safe on a boat so I had a long overdue nervous breakdown.”

Eric doesn’t remember much of it. It’s better that way.)

+

… _Ella?_

_No, Xāwuṭh._

… _oh. Wolf? …Am I dreaming this?_

_Go the fuck back to sleep._

+

“You look annoyed,” Eric says one day early in 2014. The boat is finally starting to feel safe, and he can count on one hand the number of full-blown blackouts he went through in the last month. As for Xāwuṭh, he often looks annoyed, and it’s made worse by the scar. When he doesn’t look annoyed and smiles instead, he looks just like their father making his gleeful shark face. Honestly, it’s fucking hilarious.

Speaking of their father, Xāwuṭh has just finished a radio call with him. He does it pretty regularly, and Eric never listens in, even when Xāwuṭh offers. Too much temptation—too much risk. Talking with Django doesn’t usually leave Xāwuṭh annoyed though, hence Eric’s curiosity.

Xāwuṭh says: “Dad didn’t pick up on your old call-sign,” and Eric feels like all his blood left his limbs in a rush. He feels woozy and too cold and fuck this, they are in the South China sea, it never goes cold here why—

“… You—dammit, Wolf! You can’t—“

“Chill,” Wolf growls, and the sounds goes straight through Eric’s mounting panic. “He took me literally.”

“ _Min thveu noh chea thmei mtong tiet!!_ ”

It takes Eric the better part of the day to come down from the panic and the hyperarousal. But hey, it doesn’t get any worse from there.

Small victories.

+

_Ella? …no, Xāwuṭh. …why do you keep dreaming about boats?_

_Hey, stop wandering in if it bothers you that much._

+

It’s crazy the things one can learn to do.

Eric doesn’t ask where Xāwuṭh’s getting him his 3D printing supplies from, and Xāwuṭh doesn’t volunteer the info. It doesn’t take long before he has his first leg printed and fitted and fuck if it doesn’t feel better. Not that it doesn’t necessarily work well, not at first. But he learns, in between tracking satellites crossover times and US movements in the South Pacific and other things, he learns about neural interfaces and little fiddly bullshit parts and industrial design. Soon he has a limb that looks cool and that works, even if he needs to keep walking around with a cane. Soon he has fingers prosthesis that actually work well, and it’s a relief to be able to hold and fire a gun properly again. Using his left hand never felt right, even if he could still bullseye his targets.

Being able to use his gun is one big step on the way to Calm-The-Fuck-Down Town.

There’s nothing to be done for his face or his vision. At least on Wolf’s boat he could ditch the fucking hats and glasses, and he had the time to dye the shock-white out of his hair if he needed to go ashore. Two more steps. Being on the boat, being around Xāwuṭh, around one of his siblings and not hopping in the dark with his mind trying to find someone to answer him back anymore has been several more steps. Not having to run mostly aimlessly most of the time, more steps. Semi-regular sleep, more steps.

Eric faces this head-on: denial is never going to help. He’s not all right, not even close to okay, and he’ll never be back to completely all right, but he’s still alive. He’s still alive and he’s tired of running.

It’s Xāwuṭh’s idea to set up a place out of the way. He has been using Mapun as a stop for years, so it comes to no surprise to anyone when he buys land there and builds two houses. There’s a little tourism, several schools, feral chickens and mosquitos Eric wants nothing to do with. Best of all, nobody really pays attention to Eric beyond the initial stares at leg and face. He fades into the background pretty fast: not white, speaks if not the language, a couple others that mark him as being from this part of the world, and he arrived with Wolf. All that, it’s enough to brand him as someone who belongs here.

Eric sets up shop, sets up his surveillance, his computers, his workshop. He’s on his second 3D printed leg and he wants a better one. If he keeps giving Xāwuṭh information about movements across the sea from there to Thailand, well, he’s not asking what Xāwuṭh is actually doing with it.

He’s still a ghost, but he’s not alone anymore. It goes a long way.

+

_Ella… Xāwuṭh?_

_Right there._

_Yeah._

+

Then it’s 2016.

Eric watches the footage of his childhood house turned into a crater, then the crater that was his and Ella’s house, with disbelief. He expects the call from Xāwuṭh—it’s a relief to hear the old call-signs and codes in their conversation, it means they’re all alive and the plans made a lifetime ago are a go. He spends far too much time wondering if he updated the maps of where he and Ella buried the bags the last time. Anyway, Ella would remember most of them. It’s not like Eric could call to tell them where they are, if they even are where he remembers them. It’s been almost eleven years at this point, after all.

He feeds Wolf all the info he needs to stay a step ahead of things. Eric takes great delight in the confusion on military channels when he knows his crazy badass family is in Brunei.

Then there’s a message he never even hoped he’d see: “Hey, Eye in the Sky. Got a boat full. You ready to host?”

+

_Ella._

+

When Wolf’s boat reaches Mapun, Eric is waiting.

Dying didn’t take. He’s done his time as a ghost. He’s ready to live.

 

__

**Author's Note:**

> Translation:
> 
>  _“Min thveu noh chea thmei mtong tiet!!”_ : "Never do that again," in Khmer, and given that I've used Google Translate and the work window here refused to even recognize half the characters to write it in any other way than like this, it's super wrong. I welcome all corrections.


End file.
